Extreme Sexual Deviant Tells All

Twelve-year-old Grace Budd disappeared from her New York home in 1928, in the company of a seemingly kindly middle-aged man named Albert Fish. He’d ingratiated himself with Grace’s parents and convinced them to allow him to take their daughter to a birthday party. He stopped long enough to retrieve the weapons he’d hidden. His plans involved no birthday party.

Grace never returned, and her disappearance became a sensational case with many strange twists. Six years later, her family received a bizarre letter from Grace’s abductor, who described how he’d killed little Grace and cooked her into a stew. He’d eaten her.

The Budd family turned this letter over to the police and a dogged investigator traced the stationery to a former tenant of a flophouse – Albert Fish. Under arrest, he confessed in lurid detail, admitting to the crime and adding an abundance of child abuse incidents. Eventually, he confessed to more murders.

Dr. Frederic Wertham, the senior psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital and a proponent of Freud’s psychoanalytic approach, examined Fish extensively before his 1935 trial. These records have been sealed for a long time, but in 2010, the Library of Congress released them for public research. In fact, all 222 containers of Wertham’s research files are now available.

John Borowski, who’d made a documentary about Fish in 2007, was eager to see the records. “Dr. Wertham’s files are not only important as an insight into the demented mind of Albert Fish,” he writes in the Introduction to his latest book Albert Fish: In his Own Words, “but they are also important because they draw attention to the gaping holes in the American justice system…”

In this book, Borowski includes what Wertham wrote about his experience with Fish in his 1949 book, The Show of Violence. Also included are Fish’s psychiatric exams, the trial transcripts, the brief autobiography Fish had penned for the New York Daily Mirror, and his correspondences. Some of this material has never been seen before. You even get to see the notes made on Fish’s responses to the Rorschach test, as well as photos of his handwriting.

This is the most comprehensive collection of raw data on the Fish case that I’ve ever seen. Researchers will be grateful to Borowski and true crime readers who think they know this case will learn much more.

Fish, it turns out, had a lot to say. He was a “man of passion,” he said, and he compared his perverse desires with a horse whose tail was lit on fire. The horse ran “but the fire went with him.” That, Fish said, is the man of passion. “The fire chases you and catches you and then it’s in your blood. And after that, it’s the fire that has control, not the man.”

And, he adds, “there are lots of us.”

Fish told Wertham that his wife’s faithlessness had opened up the floodgates of his sexual troubles; he’d allowed himself to express his desires, uninhibited. And they were persistent and bizarre.

“I have always had the desire to inflict pain on others and to have others inflict pain on me,” Fish stated. Finding things with which to hurt himself was uppermost in his mind, such as inserting the stems of roses into his urethra. Wertham counted eighteen different paraphilias, from cannibalism to vampirism to necrophilia. Fish also liked to whip and mutilate boys. And he whipped himself.

In his drive to feel pain, Fish shoved needles into his groin between the anus and scrotum, and according to X-ray evidence, two-dozen were still there in varying stages of decay.

The contents of this book can be overpowering. I don’t recommended perusing it while you’re eating or before you go to sleep. Fish discusses his targeted victims and what he imagined doing to them. He also describes what he did do to some of them. When he talks about dreams and visions, he’s even more perverse. Borowski includes it all. You can count on him to be unflinching, as he has been in his prior work.

When my students view Borowski’s documentary about Fish, they’re fascinated and appalled. It’s definitely memorable. So is this book, and his most recent film on Serial Killer Culture.

About Albert Fish, Wertham wrote, “However you define the medical and legal borders of sanity, this certainly is beyond that border.” If you have a strong enough stomach to read this book all the way through, you’ll probably agree.

Why are you so obsessed with the dark side of life?
It's evil murderer's or Ghosts.
I was under Polterguist assult as a youth, and let me tell
you it was NOT a pleasent experiece! Being smacked upside the
head. Having my hair pulled by unseen hands. Sleeping with
the covers over my head, and seeing a palm imprint on those
covers working it's way up the sheet. The poundings and
rappings and seeing the doornob turn. That's only SOME OF
IT.
Maybe you and Dr. Bonn should get together. He also has an
obsession for serial killers.

Anonymous: I'm sorry, but I must dismiss your entire comment. Why? You didn't give your real name, which tells me you have something to hide; which tells me you're not telling the truth; which tells me your simmering vitriol is very personal and therefore your comment cannot be trusted. Indeed, you sound a bit jealous to me.

If you ever want to be taken seriously, always give your real name. I did.

I appreciate that, Kevin. I generally don't respond to anonymous postings for these same reason. In this case, it's just silly to post something like this person's comments on a blog with the theme stated quite clearly. Some people just don't know what a blog is for.

I don't know much about computers as I have only used
them for a couple of years. If you want to know my real
name you can google it at the Casey Anthony forum on Topix.
She is the one we should be studying 8 ways to Sunday!
But phoney Psychology can't even explain what her problem
is!

Or you could have written your name in the body of your last post. So we're going to have to give you a name: "Coward." Then, considering that you've gone out of your way to read a blog about dark subject matter, and then criticized the author for writing about exactly what you yourself have sought out, I think we can also call you "Hypocritical." Hypocritical Coward :) Now scurry off back to the Casey Anthony forum on Topix where I'm sure your insight is of tremendous value.

What I find most disturbing is Fish's comment, "There are lots of us." How would he know that, unless he was in contact with other child predator/murderers?

It makes me wonder, how accurate ARE the statistics RE the percentage of the population that sadistic sexual predators/rapists/murderers comprise?

Over the years I've come to believe that incest is grossly underreported and therefor grossly underestimated, so, perhaps child sexual predators/child murderers are much more prevalent than we could even guess. I'm an "old gal" now, near retirement age, and its just heart-breaking when I recall how many women I've met and become friends with over the years who have shared with me that they were sexually molested as kids or teens by a blood relative or a step-parent, but they never reported it. I think if the actual percentage of incest victims/child rape were known, everyone would be appalled.

I also wanted to comment about posting anonymously. I am using only part of my real name, because I experienced cyber-stalking and in-person stalking from a disturbed individual for several years; it only ended about a year ago. Long ago as a college kid I experienced in-person stalking by a different individual. So, it feels kind of scary for me to post using my real name, now. If the Internet ever decides to make it impossible for a person to post anonymously, I guess I'll have to stop posting. I only use my real name on my private email accounts, and only correspond with people I already know.

So, I just wanted to share that some anonymous posters may choose to remain anonymous for reasons of safety, not in order to be a troll.

When someone complains about why I post the things I post when the blog is clearly about these things, it seems silly to me. And quite a few of the people who post as anonymous on this blog have been trolls. Nastiness far outweighs serious queries.

I was wondering about your take on the accuracy of statistics regarding the prevalence of these deviants.

The really extreme cases like Fish are hopefully consistently low in number, but... I personally think that the statistics on incest: the number of child victims of incest, are grossly underreported, and that (in my opinion) would tie into the stats RE how many child predators/pedophiles and possibly how many child murderers like Fish there actually are. I think that there are a LOT more child predators out there than the estimates show.

Or am I just being kind of paranoid? Do you think the stats are more or less accurate?

If the cases are not reported, we have no way of knowing numbers or percentages. We can only guess, but that doesn't mean we're accurate. Lots of people like to state a percentage of "unreported cases," but from where do their numbers come? I'd like to know.

I read your post because of the headline. I liked your thorough assessment of the book. I didn't know people like this existed.

People like Fish captivate the mind. They cannot be ignored because of the danger they put all of humanity in. They are evil so you want to destoy them but if you do you won't gain any insights to help you catch the next one more quickly.

People like this frighten me to the point that I do not want them kept in cages. I want them destroyed. That way we know that they are no longer a threat.

This post disturbed me. It is repellant but I don't blame you for writing it. Something is just not right with it.

I find it interesting, his rationale, as if his evil deviance somehow made him Special. He's not a monster, in his own mind, he's 'a man of passion.' The dark side of the power of naming. It allowed him to never quite see what was so blindly obvious to the rest of the world. His abrogation of his own power of choice was total.

I'm really amazed that people would give that statement by Fish any credence whatsoever on its own, without any backup from studies or other scientific data. Fish was a serial killer, which, by definition, made him a very manipulative person - hardly a credible source! Moreover, he'd Want to believe there were others like him, wouldn't he? Make his own crimes seem less heinous. That people would even begin to give serious consideration to that statement by Fish, I consider to be a testament to the monumental power of suggestibility in the human race.